California Rewritten
A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
Dive into the revelatory worlds of California's most exciting writers, and discover how their books uncover our history and can help us imagine our shared future.
"In Freeman's hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation." —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds
Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, Julie Otsuka: As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, "Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now." Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California's literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal's popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now. He shows us how the state's most exciting writers can unlock our understanding of the past, and how they can deepen our imaginations as we confront the most pressing issues that face our society: labor and inequality, migration and citizenship, technology and its limits, changing landscapes and climate catastrophe. Incisive and compulsively readable, California Rewritten will be a source of empowering discovery for any book lover who cares about the Golden State.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Knopf executive editor Freeman (Dictionary of the Undoing) delivers a wide-ranging if occasionally head-scratching critical survey of contemporary California literature. His selections, each of which is discussed in standalone essays, range from histories to prize-winning literary novels, poetry collections, and bestselling mysteries, and provide a panoramic view of works inspired by the Golden State. At times, Freeman's enthusiasm can be excessive, as when he contends in consecutive entries that both Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us and Elaine Castillo's America Is Not the Heart should be taught regularly in schools, and makes grandiose literary comparisons (" Kushner is our Genet and our new Dostoevsky"). The collection is ultimately less than the sum of its parts; such critical assessments as calling Paul Beatty's The Sellout "easily one of the best LA novels ever written," feel somewhat diminished when Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin is subsequently categorized as "one of the finest meditations in California writing on how families live among, make, and depend on memories," and Kushner's The Mars Room is named "one of the great American novels about time" and "quietly one of the best American novels on stalking." Readers will be best served by dipping selectively into this impassioned tribute.
